Jan Macháček

“That was for the smoke, so in winter there was much work, scratching, pulling out, you take whole large bits out, dust bins are cleared, loading, in summer there was hardly any work. Of course, there were different people in the boiler room, there was one jehovist, he did not bother anyone at all, there was n evangelist, then there was Míra Hájek, who was called Nemira Hájek, who was a chartist, but he was like an alcoholic who actually was half-living there and kept drinking at the hotel, and no one bothered him, so as he was still washing black dishes, he worked as a half-homeless. Yet again, he was good at some things, he might have taught me how to go to court, that he went to court a lot, and when he was in court, he was supposed to promote it, as it was a kind of a hobby.“

“To an extent we were just an ordinary family on the outside, in the light of how normalisation worked. So how we used to say that normalisation was the escape to privacy in case of my parents it was completely obvious. And they actually did not mind it too much, as they both enjoyed spending time together and did not care for social life a lot, they did not seek big company, nor parties, they were just together a lot, but exactly this kind of escape to cottages and gardens, they fit into that form totally, as they kept working in the garden, or the house, of course those were manual jobs mostly. A man can hardly imagine today that my mother, as we did not have an automatic machine for a long time, she was washing clothes downstairs with a kind of centrifuge and she normally washed our clothes in the washtub, so when she had her study day off once a week, she just kept washing, you know.”